We have powerful computer software today that lets a single CAD engineer replace a room full of draftsman. We can spin up 20 different virtual designs then test them in virtual wind tunnels before a single physical mockup is made. Material science advances also can make your job easier in areas like friction and keeping weight down.

So while I agree things are orders of magnitude more complex, our tools are also much more powerful.

JSF studies started in 1993, when the fastest computer was a 235.8 GFLOPS behemoth -- roughly the speed of a midrange gaming GPU today.